Lhasa de Sela obituary

The Mexican-American singer-songwriter Lhasa de Sela, who has died aged 37 of breast cancer, created three extraordinary albums over the course of 12 years. She achieved fame more by word of mouth than through the media, but won various awards, including the Québécois Félix in 1997, a Canadian Juno in 1998 and a BBC award for world music in 2005.

The seeds of Lhasa's unusual songwriting lay in the cultural background of her parents and the nomadic lifestyle they had chosen. She was born in a cabin in Big Indian, New York state, the daughter of a Mexican father and American mother who at the time of her birth were hippies. She and her sisters grew up in a converted school bus in which the family crisscrossed North America and Mexico. They were educated at home, learning from books, music and artistic activity. Lhasa's childhood was filled with vivid experiences. Her parents, she felt, taught her to follow the heart, find her own way, be original.

Settling first in San Francisco with her mother when her parents split up, she moved in her late teens to Montreal. She honed her craft singing in bars and began composing songs in three languages. Her three albums, the mostly Spanish La Llorona (1997), the French-Spanish The Living Road (2003) and, in English, Lhasa (2009), were filled with songs fuelled by dreams, love, relationships and life events filtered through an imagination shaped by folk tales.

She formed a duo with Yves Desrosiers and gradually began performing and recording with a close circle of fine musicians, enjoying the creativity inspired by close collaboration. While her music drew on wide-ranging sources, from Mexican ranchera and French chanson to Arabic song, with touches of Americana, it was startlingly original in every way.

Extensive touring with the Canadian all-female music festival Lilith Fair left Lhasa feeling burnt out, and in 1998 she joined Pocheros, her sisters' touring circus, in France. Songs such as Con Toda Palabra and La Marée Haute, written during this time, were windows into an intense inner world. For the circus's clown and tightrope work, Lhasa distilled often surreal images into words which she set to brooding melodies, with loping rhythms that evoked mysterious journeys. Often disconcerting, her songs express a place where imagination and reality meet, and where courage triumphs over fear and darkness. They are 21st-century songs of enchantment.

Life, Lhasa said, was "a road constantly changing and, being on it, you change too". She gained a passionate following in Canada and France, and toured the UK, revelling in an early invitation from the Nottingham pop noir group Tindersticks to work with them. Her fame grew and her songs featured in the television series The Sopranos, a Madonna documentary and Sophie Barthes's 2009 film, Cold Souls.

Last year, Lhasa told me that she was delighted to have arranged and produced her third disc herself, with five musicians rather than 20, recording "as live" on analogue rather than digital tape, and rejoiced in the warmth given to her pared-down arrangements. The album had been recorded before her cancer was diagnosed. When I asked whether its songs were prophetic, she described Rising as a crisis song, its images those of "somebody being caught up by a storm, pulled up into the air, like a wave rising up and down, and rising again. For over a year, I could not make head or tail of it and then it fell into place. The images are violent, even chaotic, but there is something simple and serene there too." Anyone and Everyone, the disc's final, cathartic song, expressed her happiness, she said, "feeling my feet in the earth, having a place in the world, of things taking care of themselves".

Back in 2004, we had discovered inadvertently that I knew the whereabouts of an old friend of her father, who had been feared "disappeared" after the 1973 Chilean coup, and I was able to put them in touch. Lhasa's parents had played a lot of Chilean music during the 1970s and she confessed that, with childish innocence, she had dreamed then of marrying the legendary singer Víctor Jara when she grew up, not understanding what his murder under the Pinochet dictatorship meant until she was much older. Latterly, she spoke of plans to record Jara's songs.

Lhasa is survived by her partner, Ryan, her parents, and nine brothers and sisters.

• Lhasa de Sela, singer-songwriter, born 27 September 1972; died 1 January 2010